


The Broken Beats

by poisontaster



Series: Dying of the Lightverse [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Future Fic, M/M, Sibling Incest, Someone Finds Out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-13
Updated: 2006-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-04 09:49:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5329670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's struggling to keep the family together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Broken Beats

**One.**

"Dad?"

He's almost asleep when he hears Miria stir, hears her soft voice chirp against the silence.

"Yeah?" Coming up to wakefulness _hurts_ , aching deep in the bone. He's not as young as he used to be. He opens his eyes and turns his head—another twinge—and sees her eyes gleam in the sticky dark.

"What about Mom and Jake?"

Like Sam, Miria has a way of asking one question so it sounds more like a hundred. And ninety-nine of them, Dean won't have any idea how to answer. "I don't know," he says finally, truthfully, because that was the deal. He's as truthful as he can be with his kids. "We're going to find Jake now."

In his mind, he curses the miles of distance between them and Shay Davies' home, curses himself for leaving Jake there and not staying when the little boy came down sick. It seemed harmless enough at the time, but Dean thinks he should have learned about 'harmless' already.

"You think he's okay?"

 _I think he's six and sick and small for his age,_ Dean thinks, _and only the fact that he's with other hunters, and some damn good ones at that, gives me any hope at all._ What he says is, "He's with Auntie Shay and Uncle Tim. They're good people."

"Yeah." Doubt quavers loudly in her voice and he holds out his arm to her. Kait is curled up against his side and Evan twined around her, but he lets Miria settle awkwardly on his chest the way she did when she was years younger. "I just…he's so little, Dad." She sounds agonized, shivering in micro-tremors all through her body.

"I know." He strokes her hair soothingly. "But he'll be okay. He's little, but he's tough."

"Yeah." He hears her swallow, a loud click.

"Go to sleep, honey," he tells her. "We gotta get an early start tomorrow."

"Okay." She wriggles against him, trying to arrange long, coltish limbs into something like comfort. She jabs him good a few times, but he manages to hold in his grunt. Then: "But what about Mom? She's all alone."

Dean thinks of Lena. He'd like to say he doesn't care. That it doesn't matter to him if she lives or dies. But for as much as she's hurt him and tried to do worse, for as many times as she's hurt the kids, or Sam, he can't hate anyone that much. Lena's sins are catalogued in his mind, a long and well-populated list, but they're all human sins. "I don't know," he says again. It seems to be like the only thing he can say lately. _I don't know, I don't know, I just don't fucking know._ "But your Mom's a survivor, hon. Just like you."

"Can we go?" Miria asks. "Can we go look for Mom too?"

The miles between Oakland and Shay's place in Napa already seem endless, especially with small children and no car and who knows what dangers between them. Across the country seems like another planet. "Not now," Dean says, hating to say it. Hating to lay that burden on her. "Not…until we find Jake, find out what the lay of the land is. It's a long way, honey."

Miria doesn't say anything, but her shaking gets worse and after a moment, she turns her face against his chest and he can feel the wetness of her tears, soaking into his skin. "I'm sorry, Mir," he whispers helplessly and wonders if this is the true legacy of the Winchester men, having to sit with no answers while their children long for their mothers.

 

**Check One.**

Shay and Tim's house is a shambles when they get there. There are smudges on the ceilings and walls and Sam speculates it was the lickers. Shay is on the back porch, dead on her back, her throat slit raggedly. Both shells are still in her shotgun. She never even had a chance to fire.

Tim they find behind a half-built barricade in one of the outbuildings…or what's left of him, anyway.

"Dad?" Miria calls. "Did you find him? Is Jake in there? Is he okay?"

"No, he's not in here," Sam says for him, when Dean's voice fails. His fingers bracelet Dean's wrist, hard enough to crush the bones together. "You stay out there with Tab and the twins, okay? Give a shout if you see something."

"How old's your boy?" Lynette asks, an ugly, white set to her mouth.

"Six," Dean answers and scratches hard enough at his scalp that there could be welts. " _Fuck!_ "

"Dad! Dad!" That was Kait and if she sounded excited, Dean knew he'd better _sprint_. He and Sam almost do some kind of Three Stooges routine in the narrow door, bumping shoulders and hips, but Dean slithers through ahead of his brother and bursts out into the dazzling, baking sunshine, half-blind as he wheels, looking for his kids.

"Dean!" Sam says, behind him and he pivots.

The kids are standing together near where the property starts to fade into scrubby foothills and he's about to start yelling at all of them for not having the sense God gave a dog to stay put when there are monsters and zombies just _wandering loose_ when he sees Miria crawling backwards out of a pretty big piece of hollowed tree. She's dragging Jake out and Dean's barely conscious of the pound of Sam's feet next to his as he crosses the distance in what feels like the blink of an eye.

He falls to his knees and scoops the boy out of Miria's arms. Jake feels like he only weighs about as much as a bag of sugar and he's burning up with fever, eyes half-open and glazed.

"Dad?" Jake asks. "Dad, I hid like you said. I hid until you came. The monsters came but they didn't find me. I hid."

Dean's eyes burn and he hides his face in Jake's filthy hair, trying to swallow and talk around the knot in his throat. "Yeah, you did, kid. You did great."

"Dad, I don't feel so good."

"I know," Dean says, still in that same whispery, aching voice. "You'll feel better soon. We're here. I'm here. We'll take care of you."

 

**Two.**

"Can I sit with you?" Miria asks and Dean looks up, realizing he's been brain-blown for several minutes now, just staring at Jake's writhing body bundled up under the blankets they'd rustled for him.

"Yeah, sure. 'Course you can." He scoots over a little to make room.

"How is he?" Miria settles on her knees next to Jake and puts her sun browned hand over his. She's washed her hands recently, neat lines on her wrist where the dirt picks up again. Jake shudders, mutters something Dean can't catch and shifts uneasily in his sleep.

Dean shrugs, trying not to look or sound as worried as he feels. They'd raided more than a few drug stores on the way up to the valley, stocking up on all the antibiotics, painkillers and other stuff they could carry. Jake just needs time for them to kick in, that's all. Just a little while. "Hanging in there," he says.

"Are we going to stay here?" She doesn't look at him, rubbing Jake's arm lightly, reassuringly.

"For a little while, at least," Dean agrees. "Until Jake can travel." He doesn't think about what they'll do if Jake takes a turn for the worse. The medicine will work. Jake survived this long, long enough for Dean to get here…he'll survive this.

"And then what?"

And the truth is that Dean hasn't thought that far ahead. He doesn't suppose any of them have. It's been a series of one-step maneuvers: Get through the first rush, get to the car, get out of the city, get to Jake. Now he's at the end of that string and he doesn't know what the next logical step is. They're all alive and he's got Sam and he's got his kids and they've got enough ammo to still throw a hurt into any motherfucker that comes at them and that's been enough.

Hell, that's more than he expected, when it all started going south.

They both look up at the sound of feet on the floorboards, going past. They've picked up a couple more survivors in the past day; a girl named Dana that's already half-feral—Lynette thinks she's been raped as well as shocky from all the other assorted traumas of the past week—and a skinny geek-boy named Bear that reminds Dean of Sam before he put on the muscle.

"I don't know, kiddo," Dean says, when the feet—and their owner—have moved onto the other part of the house. From the tread, he guesses it was Bear. Sam would have looked in on them and everyone else is too light. "I guess that's something we all have to talk about."

"What makes you think there's anywhere else to go?" Miria says and the deep bitterness of her tone shocks him

"Oh, there's always somewhere else to go," he says, trying to keep it light.

"Nowhere safe."

"Hey." He tugs her tee-shirt sleeve. It's filthy and he guesses they need to think about laundry pretty soon or the zombies are going to start smelling them coming. " _Hey_." He tugs again and pulls her into his lap, wrapping his arms around her. "Your Uncle Sammy and I have kept you pretty safe so far, right?"

Miria squirms and makes an indeterminate noise.

"Right?" he repeats.

"Yeah," she says unwillingly. "Geez, Dad, you're strangling me."

Dean puts his hands on his knees and leans back. Miria sits up straighter, but makes no move to climb out of his lap.

"We're safe. As long as you're with the family, you're safe, okay?"

Miria makes another noise, this one disbelieving. Then, after a few minutes. "I keep trying to cry and I can't. I feel like I want to, but they won't come and instead I just feel sick." She looks up at him. "Do you think I'm getting sick?"

Dean shakes his head. "I think you'll cry when you're ready to cry, hon."

Miria sighs and her thin, small shoulders slump before she leans sideways to rest against his chest. "Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"I miss Mom."

He rubs her back, feeling the delicate knobbles of her vertebrae against his palm. "I know you do."

 

**Check Two.**

The fever breaks. Jake is weak and cranky, but Sam rigs up a carry pack from stuff around Shay's house and the kid seems content enough to travel like that.

They think about staying. Despite what happened to Shay and Tim, the house is a sturdy one and reasonably defensible with some modifications and repairs. But none of them want to stay, for reasons none of them can articulate clearly, other than vague uneasiness.

So they go, wandering gradually eastward. Dean thinks there's an irony to this; that it took the end of the world to get him and Sam on the road again.

"We're okay," Sam says to him the first night. Jake is curled up in Sam's lap, Sam's long fingers trailing through the spiky mess of Jake's dark hair. "Look at me, Dean. We're okay."

Dean nods even though he's not sure how much he believes it.

 

**Three.**

"Dad?"

"Jesus, Miria! Kinda peeing here!" Dean hastily shakes off and zips up before turning to face her. Color burns bright and hectic in her face and she's looking everywhere but at him.

"Yeah," She says, dragging her foot through the pine mast and leaving behind a smear. "I'm sorry. But I really wanted to talk to you."

"It couldn't wait?" He's yelping, high-pitched and weird, but he thinks he gets a bye for it. He clears his throat.

"I didn't…I wanted to talk to _just_ you," she says finally, still not meeting his eyes. He reaches out and grabs her elbow and she looks up at him, some terrible pressure he can't understand in her face.

"Hey," he says softly, guiding her over to a fallen log for them to sit. "What is it?"

"I just…" Her head hangs and her fingers make knots between her outspread thighs. She looks at them like they're the most fascinating things in the world. "Promise you won't be mad?"

"Yeah," Dean says. "Sure. 'Course I do."

She looks up and the blush is stronger than ever, like a really bad sunburn all across her fair skin. "I know… I saw you. You and Uncle Sammy. I mean…I know about you guys."

If he could have moved, Dean thinks he might have fallen right off the log. As it is, he feels frozen in place, skewered through. _No._ His mind is filled with it, a rejection as utter as it is thorough. _God, no. Please, no._

"Oh, God," Miria moans, hiding her face in her hands so that only her eyes peek through. "You're mad. I knew you'd be mad."

"N…no." Dean manages finally. He knows he and Sam have been sloppy since the world fell apart; the need to keep an eye on the kids at all times crossed with the _need_ to have Sam touching him, to be able to touch Sam and anchor himself in that and them…they've been sloppy. They've been _stupid_. "I'm not…Christ, I'm not mad, kiddo. Really. I just…you kind of caught me by surprise there. What…what do you know about me and Uncle Sammy?"

Most of the time, he compares Miria to Sam, but the look she gives him then is _pure_ Dean and on the receiving end of it, he almost feels ashamed of asking. Almost. Because he _is_ still the patent-holder on that particular expression. " _Dad_ ," she says reproachfully.

"I…" Oh, God. Oh, God, oh, _God_. "I'm sorry, honey. I…I don't even know what to say, past that. I'm sorry. And I'm sorry you had to see that. It…it won't happen again." Because that was the deal he made with himself. Never if it endangers the kids or his relationship with them. He feels sick to his stomach, just that quick and he doesn't know why—whether it's having this secret exposed to the air like the beetle crawling bottom of a rock or at the thought of having to give up Sam _yet again_.

"No." Miria pulls her legs up on the log, wrapping skinny arms around her scabbed knees. "No, you don't understand. It's _okay_ , Dad."

This time Dean does fall off the log, the bark scraping his back over the rakes from Sam's broken, chewed nails. "It…it's _okay_?" he croaks. He's amazed he can say that much.

Miria makes a face. "Well, I don't want to ever _see_ it again, that's for sure. And…" She hides her face in her knees. "It's _weird_ , okay? I mean… It's really weird. But…" Her shoulders shake with a sigh and then she looks up again. "Uncle Sammy makes you happy, Dad. I mean, really, really happy. I've been thinking about this a lot. Like, a _lot._ "

Dean squirms but he can't say anything, held in place by the potential judgment of his eleven year old daughter.

"And I guess…it kind of makes sense, you know? I mean, Mom always said that you guys were kind of weird about each other. I just... I didn't _know_."

Dean tries not to get angry at the implication of what Lena said, that she's been filling his children's ears with suspicion and innuendo and possibly outright lies. Tries and fails and suddenly he's very glad that there are several states between him and his ex-wife.

"But… This isn't new, is it?" Miria asks. "I mean, you guys…this isn't new. I don't…"

Dean would like to look down, or at least look away from her, but that seems like the pussy way out and so he doesn't. "Do you want to know how long?" he asks helplessly, spreading his hands. "I…I'll tell you whatever you want to know, kid. You deserve at least that much…God, I'm so _sorry_."

"I don't know what I want to know," Miria admits, chewing on her lip. "Are…are the twins going to be like that?"

Dean chokes a little. It's honestly never occurred to him whether the kids would repeat that particular sin of theirs; their lives are so different from his and Sam's, their connections more—heh—normal than his were ever allowed to be. "No," he says quickly. "No. God, I hope not."

Miria nods. "Me too. They're weird, but…I don't want them to be _that_ weird. I think… I feel left out enough as it is."

"Aw, hon…" He reaches for her and then stops, unsure if that's okay anymore, if she'll let him or want him to. But then she kind of pitches forward into him and it's reflex for his arms to go around her. Miria hides her face in his shoulder, trembling and brittle as a fall leaf. "You're not left out, hon. You're a Winchester, just like the rest of us."

Miria shakes her head.

"How long?" she asks, after a while. "Has it been always?"

Dean's silent a while. "Not always," he admits finally, reluctant. "A long time."

Her face comes up and he sees the sun has burned new freckles in her fair skin the same way it's burned them into his. The next time they stop for supplies, he'll have to look for some suntan lotion. "Longer than me?"

"Sort of. Yeah. Not…not always."

"But you love him, right? Like boys and girls?"

"I…" A flash of movement catches his eye; Dean looks up and sees Sam in a gap in the foliage, a questioning look on his face. Dean shakes his head slightly. Miria looks over her shoulder and glimpses Sam too. Then she glances back at him. Dean finally looks down, his fingernail scratching the log's bark nervously. "Yeah, Mir," he says quietly. "Is that okay?"

"It's your life, Dad."

Dean shakes his head. "I meant what I said. I… _we'll_ stop." He rakes a hand through his hair. " _Fuck._ We should stop."

"Dad." Miria puts her hand on his wrist, squeezing. "I meant what I said," she insists. She gives a short, unsteady laugh. "It's the end of everything, Dad. Why shouldn't you? If he makes you happy, why not?"

"Because I want you to be happy more than I care about what makes me happy," Dean tells her, cupping her face. He rubs a spot of dirt on her cheekbone with his thumb.

"What would make me happy is my life back!" Miria says bitterly, her eyes flooding with tears. "I want Mom, and I want our house and I want…I want things to be _normal again_ …" She ducks her face from his grip and pulls back when he tries to hug her again, wiping her eyes furiously with the backs of her wrists. "But I can't have that," she says more calmly a second later. "And I just… You never get to be happy, Dad. You and Uncle Sammy…you work so hard. Saving people and working and just…stuff. And I want you to be happy. Uncle Sammy, too."

"You're what makes me happy, kiddo."

Miria rolls her eyes. "Geez, Dad. Way to get all mushy-face."

Dean grins. "Yeah, you know me. I'm all about the caring and the sharing."

 

**Check, Check.**

"Miria knows," Dean says, when they've turned over the watch to Bear and Lynette and Sam is pressing him into the barn and sucking on his neck.

"Hmmm?" Sam hums against his throat, adding a scrape of his teeth that makes Dean grind against Sam's thigh. And _shouldn't_ always seems so much clearer before Sam touches him. He wonders what the minimum safe distance on that should be.

"She knows about us."

Sam gets still, his mouth open against Dean's skin and panting in damp blurts of breath that speed up at Dean's words. He pulls away slowly and it's too dark to make out anything but the barest shine of his eyes. "What? She does? How…?"

Dean reaches up and grabs Sam at the bicep, keeping him from pulling any further away. "She saw us."

"Christ," Sam hisses and Dean hears Sam's fingers rake through his hair. "I… Jesus, Dean. I don't even know what to say."

Dean tugs Sam into him, his other hand hooking through Sam's belt loop. "She says she's okay with it."

"And you believe her?" Sam sounds disbelieving, that's for sure.

"I don't know," Dean admits. They stand there like that, panting for a while in the dark, Sam's body rigid. Then Sam slumps and his forehead bows to touch Dean's.

"What do you want me to do, Dean?" Sam asks softly, tiredly. "I… I'll do whatever you want."

Dean snakes his hand around to Sam's ass, cupping him, tugs him closer still until they're touching from head to toe. "I don't know," Dean answers. "I want… I want you to help me figure it out. Because I don't know. And it's still us, no matter how you look at it." He reaches up and brings Sam's mouth down to his. Sam's shaking and Dean understands because it's been almost a decade of _again_ and fighting to get there and it's too much to decide right now. "It's still Dean and Sam."

"Sam and Dean," Sam corrects, smiling against Dean's lips.

"I'm the oldest, you geek. I get top billing."

"So this is a topping issue, is it?" Sam asks, amused. "Because I'll gladly fuck your ass into the ground right now if it's going to prove something."

"Only that you vastly overestimate the power your dick has over me," Dean snorts and then Sam's pushing him back into the barn wall again and Dean breathes.

For the first time in days, Dean feels like he's breathing again.

**Author's Note:**

> Gratitude to strippedpink and maygra for beta services.


End file.
